Covid in Austria: Desperation Among the 'Experts' and 'Media' People as 1/3 of the Population are deemed 'beyond hope' (for injection)

A tale of hubris, lack of empathy and professionalism, questionable morality on display by an Ethics Professor, and tacit admissions of collossal policy failures

There’s been quite some movement since we last checked in with Covidistan’s Committee of Public Safety in mid-May.

Still, the past couple of days have shown, to quite a memorable degree, how deranged public discourse on all matters related to Covid-19 has become, never mind other, perhaps even more pressing issues, such as the impending catastrophe with respect to a possible end of Russian energy supplies (there’s no contingency planning, even though there’s no second European country that’s as reliant on Moscow in this regard than Austria); then there are the ongoing parliamentary enquiries into corruption by certain key players, virtually all of whom are, or were, connected to the governing conservative People’s Party (whose co-ruling Greens have made them accessories to any number of highly questionable, if not outright criminal, conduct—by throwing softball questions and/or outright ignoring these matters for the political gain of…remaining in power as junior partner).

And then there remains—Covid-19, to which we now turn.

Earlier this week, yet another hit-piece by notorious mandate hawk Gabriele Scherndl caught my eye. As the above illustration indicates, injection uptake has all but cratered: ‘a fifth of the eligible population still remains unvaccinated. Every now and then, one of them receives his or her first dose’, Der Standard writes, asking: ‘what motivates them right now to do so?’ (my emphases below)

The huge clock in the waiting area shows shortly after 1 p.m. By then, he has already spoken to a single first-time vaccinee today, says Ferdinand Waldenberger, with a laptop, his mobile phone, and empty chairs in front of him. Waldenberger works for the Samariterbund [the labour-affiliated voluntary first responder organisation], and he is one of the physicians who advise people lining up to receive a Covid injection at the Austria Center Vienna [ACV, the city’s largest convention centre], Vienna’s largest walk-in injection clinic. And he has had so much more work before.

On average, around 3,000 Covid injections are currently conducted throughout Austria every day. Very few of them are first injections, even though one fifth of the eligible population still remains unvaccinated. Yet, these they do exist, the first-time vaccinators, sometimes 174 in the last few days, sometimes 19.

Ms. Scherndl is quite open about her paper’s—‘failure’ to figure out as to why that would be (and please share some ‘sympathy’ for her desperation as she fails to understand the issues at-hand):

[Der Standard] failed as early as January when it called for people to post as to why they were then choosing to get vaccinated for the first time. It failed, too, when it asked several times on Facebook to get in touch, anonymously if preferred. And it failed when [we] spent several hours in the ACV waiting for vaccinees. Nevertheless, there were certain insights into these matters along the way, and they all show: things went very wrong during the past few months.

In fact, here’s the money paragraph (emphases mine):

For weeks now, hardly anyone has been coming, Waldenberger says. ‘Actually since the vaccination mandate.’ In fact, the number of first-time injections has been constantly declining since mid-November—on 19 November, then-Chancellor Schallenberg (ÖVP) had announced that Austria would be the first country in Europe to institute compulsory Covid vaccination. While this never really came to pass, it nevertheless worked as an apparent deterrent.

Covid Policies Have Been A Series of Failures

So here we have the sad and sorry truth about Austro-Covidian madness masquerading as ‘emergency politics’: it’s series of policy failures, which, truth be told, certain pseudonymous internet commentators have described in just these words as early as—mid-November of last year:

The Covidistan Committee of Public Safety Meets

Covidistan Putschists Dither

Yet, more than half a year later, one thing is—painfully—obvious: both the ‘lockdown of the unvaccinated’ and the ‘injection mandates’ have failed, and miserably so. The things that keeps ye ol’ SS Covidistan afloat may be synthesised as follows:

Fear of new elections, esp. by the governing coalition of Conservatives and Greens, who stand to lose bigly, if the sovereign would be asked to weigh in.

The obvious failure of the Covid injections to prevent infection, transmission, or severity of disease (as to the latter, we shall note that there’s no data to support this notion)

Momentum, as the upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for autumn (most likely November) will feature incumbent Green party hack van der Bellen vs. a host of candidates, which, in round two, will galvanise (again, like 2016) into a, really any, anti-Freedom Party candidate (the incumbent).

All the while, the shrill cacophony of pro-mandate hawks, a wide variety of ‘expert panels’, and political ‘strategists’ (ahem) will all pull on the steering wheel, rendering the keeping of a, if not any, consistent course impossible.

Meanwhile, we’re able to follow this increasingly erratic shipwreck in pieces, such as the one cited above. Here’s a bit more of the madness that was quite common among the people about a year ago—and which may now be found only among the self-declared analysts, credentialised analysts, and their willing technocratic executioners.

Here’s more from Ms. Scherndl’s piece (again, my emphases):

The days are clearly over when vaccination was considered almost sacred [etwas Heiliges], when media outcry was loud if just one dose was thrown away, and when it was worth an article to some media that someone put on a ball gown for vaccination.

Note that there’s no irony, introspection, or self-respect in these lines.

Yet, Ms. Scherndl’s piece is also priceless in terms of revealing just these aspects among—the medical establishment:

How does one recognise first-time vacinees? Lederle says he can’t really explain it…but then Lederle speaks of people who looked like they had left their homes for the injection for the very first time since the beginning of the pandemic. You can recognise them because they are wearing gloves and are extremely anxious, says Lederle.

Yet, the most troubling passages relate to the musings by Ms. Scherndl and the medical professionals (ahem) working at the pop-up injection site. Introduced by the sub-header ‘Me, Me, Me People’ (Ich-bin-ich-Menschen), implying supreme egoism, we learn the following (emphases mine):

Most of [the first-dose recipients] do not come so late because they were afraid, but because they did not actually want to be vaccinated, says Dr. Waldenberger. He sits alone at a consultation table for quite a long time and has another term for first-time vaccinees: lone wolfs, so to say. ‘They say I can take care of myself’, he says, and that they are very reluctant to get vaccinated. Yet they do, mainly because they want to go on vacation after all, and they often want to do that in a country that prescribes vaccination.

‘Me, Me, Me People’, Waldenberger calls them. In his working life, he teaches ethics at the Sigmund Freud University. But they [the first-time vaccinees] haven’t thought through their concept of freedom, he adds. Displaying so little solidarity, they should not be allowed to make use of the state’s services when they are in bad shape. These people would rather not believe in the efficacy of vaccination against Covid-19.

[line break added for clarity] And then there are those who are angry. And they would vent their frustration on the staff. Staff, by the way, is becoming much less: There used to be 50 consulting doctors, now there are only five. Waldenberger says that they then tell the angry individuals that they are not the responsible politicians.

Couple of things: here’s a physician who teaches at a private medical school (bio here) and Chair of Health Economics and Organisational Ethics (no less), actively engaged in othering his fellow citizens (subjects). As an academic who teaches—yep: ‘ethics’, whatever that means these days.

Then there’s the thing that pisses me off personally, which is the skin-deep ‘conviction’ of those who get injected with these crap products (really, gene therapy) because they want to go on vacation. People, if that’s your biggest worry, I’ll throw a Ben Franklin quote at you: ‘Those who would give up liberty for safety deserve neither.’ Nuff said ‘bout that.

Yet, I’d argue that the most troubling aspect of this entire shitshow masquerading as ‘public health policy’ is this: Ms. Scherndl, by quoting Dr. Waldenberger only indirectly, prepares her readers for the coming demonisation of ‘the unvaccinated’. Most despicably, Dr. Waldenberger calls for the state to arbitrarily deny the tax-paying citizens (ahem) services on the basis of individuals exercising their right to choose, opting for bodily autonomy, and, for whatever reasons, he also throws in the efficacy of these products.

This is patently absurd on any number of levels, yet the most galling feature, to my mind, is actually the rampant ‘othering’ that both Der Standard and this Professor of Ethics engage in: the conscious attempt to further divide society, apparently done to curry favour with the powers-that-be.

Note, finally, the complete absence of any notion of ‘safety’ associated with these products.

Bottom Lines

This is beyond reproach and beyond contempt. If there ever was a situation where one can clearly see the spinelessness of legacy media and the medical professions’ willing contribution to the erection of bio-pharma fascism, there you go.

At least injection uptake is consistently down, in particular among first-timers, as even Ms. Scherndl admits at the bottom of her article. No amount of illegitimate pressure (the injection mandate), agit-prop to the tune of hundreds of thousands of tax-payer euros, nor public shaming by the likes of Ms. Scherndl has managed to change this:

The most recent vaccination campaign began in March and was called #GemeinsamGeimpft [#vaxxedtogether]. It consisted mainly of depictions of everyday situations that were broadcast on television and online or placed as advertisements in newspapers. It cost 400,000 €, according to the government’s joint expert advisory panel GECKO. The uptake of injections per day, which the Ministry of Health publishes on a website, has not even budged minimally upwards ever since.

You’ve gotta give it to these morons: at some point, the Accounting Office will remind everyone that spending shitloads of money on products that don’t work—both the cheap agit-prop and the Covid injections—will result in massive grift (ahem), overreach (already there), and eventually these policies will be retired, if only because they don’t yield any tangible benefit to the spineless critters who fall in the category ‘politician’ (as well as their camp-following presstitutes, like Ms. Scherndl).

The last word in this piece goes to the most recent GECKO report, which holds the following:

The responsive group of the currently unvaccinated is both small, partially immunised through recovery, and currently sees little reason to get vaccinated. It is therefore recommended that vaccination communication be geared towards maintaining the vaccination protection of those already vaccinated.

True words, here’s what Ms. Scherndl makes of this:

Cheek-in-tongue, one could summarise as follows: the others have been given up on.

Now, the true morality test is before us: will Covidistan’s Committee of Public Safety simply leave ‘the unvaccinated’ third of its population in peace—or will the régime, egged on by incessant media pressure from the likes of Ms. Scherndl and her ilk, merely double down and attempt to enforce the injection mandate?

While I think that the latter will be tried, I also believe that this particular third of the population will not budge. They haven’t so far, and it stands to reason that this will remain so.